7 ms·

I don't think it's a good article at all. A good article would be giving actual numbers. This author deals in conjecture which he presents in a way that makes

I don't think it's a good article at all. A good article would be giving actual numbers. This author deals in conjecture which he presents in a way that makes it sound like fact. Take this paragraph... "The United States is home to groundbreaking medical research, but so are other countries with much lower cost structures. Any American who's had a hip or knee replacement is standing on French innovation. Deep-brain stimulation to treat depression is a Canadian breakthrough" Now if you really wanted to present the facts you'd hunt down actual figures (e.g. how many breakthroughs were made in the U.S. vs other countries). Instead he presents a handful of breakthroughs and then treats them as proof that the rest of the world is on par with the United States in medical breakthroughs. Beyond that he quotes figures that are designed to be misleading. For example, he claims MRIs are much cheaper in Japan (which they are). But what he leaves out is the Japanese government did this by (a) arbitrarily cutting how much the Government will pay for an MRI and (b) purchasing MRI machines that have an inferior image density. So the result is you have technicians with inferior equipment rushing through MRIs because their sole customer (the Government) has arbitrarily set a really low price.

deleted 17y ago
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yummyfajitas 17y ago
Not to mention the point that other countries do research as well is flawed. You can do research in the UK with the hopes of selling in the US. This does not mean that your business plan wouldn't change if the US market dramatically shrank.
Agathos 17y ago
How much higher is the image density here? Is it worth a 15-fold markup? If I'm paying out of pocket and can't afford $1500, can I have the option of paying $100 for a lower-density image?
- mhb 17y ago
  I found these which offer MRIs in the $500 range. Maybe they're scams of some kind. Maybe not. http://www.wecaremedicalmall.org/ http://www.wecaremedicalmall.org/ http://www.mriscangroup.com/ http://www.mriscangroup.com/
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  It depends on the size of the features the doctor is looking for. In the US, we typically use 1.5-3 tesla machines at a cost of $1-4 million. Price goes up faster past 4 tesla, and 8 tesla reaches safety limitations. In-plane resolution is roughly proportional to the field gradient. On 3 tesla machines, you can get voxels on the order of 1mm x 1mm x 2.5mm [1]. On a 1.5 tesla machine, you get 2mm x 2mm x 3mm. I'm told Japan typically works in the 0.5-0.75 tesla range, so expect resolution at least as bad as 4mm x 4mm x ??. (I don't know how thick their imaging plane is.) Artifacts are also considerably worse on low resolution machines. SNR and CNR (contrast/noise ratio) is also better with higher tesla machines. [1] Some people claim better resolution, but that's mostly M.D.'s who don't understand signal processing. You can make images with pixel sizes representing 0.1mm x 0.1mm, but they usually don't convey extra information.

deleted 17y ago

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yummyfajitas 17y ago

Not to mention the point that other countries do research as well is flawed. You can do research in the UK with the hopes of selling in the US. This does not mean that your business plan wouldn't change if the US market dramatically shrank.

Agathos 17y ago

How much higher is the image density here? Is it worth a 15-fold markup? If I'm paying out of pocket and can't afford $1500, can I have the option of paying $100 for a lower-density image?

mhb 17y ago
I found these which offer MRIs in the $500 range. Maybe they're scams of some kind. Maybe not. http://www.wecaremedicalmall.org/ http://www.wecaremedicalmall.org/ http://www.mriscangroup.com/ http://www.mriscangroup.com/
yummyfajitas 17y ago
It depends on the size of the features the doctor is looking for. In the US, we typically use 1.5-3 tesla machines at a cost of $1-4 million. Price goes up faster past 4 tesla, and 8 tesla reaches safety limitations. In-plane resolution is roughly proportional to the field gradient. On 3 tesla machines, you can get voxels on the order of 1mm x 1mm x 2.5mm [1]. On a 1.5 tesla machine, you get 2mm x 2mm x 3mm. I'm told Japan typically works in the 0.5-0.75 tesla range, so expect resolution at least as bad as 4mm x 4mm x ??. (I don't know how thick their imaging plane is.) Artifacts are also considerably worse on low resolution machines. SNR and CNR (contrast/noise ratio) is also better with higher tesla machines. [1] Some people claim better resolution, but that's mostly M.D.'s who don't understand signal processing. You can make images with pixel sizes representing 0.1mm x 0.1mm, but they usually don't convey extra information.